The Progress Paradox: How Life Gets Better While People Feel Worse by Gregg Easterbrook © 2004, shows how one’s quest for perfection, status, latest trends, etc. only serve to manifest unhappiness rather than happiness. Buying more will only highlight that there are more things to buy or do. “Call this: ‘the revenge of the plastic.’” How can you alter your perceptions?

Perhaps not the lightest reading suggested by this column, this issue’s selection, The Progress Paradox: How Life Gets Better While People Feel Worse by Gregg Easterbrook © 2004, shows how one’s quest for perfection, status, latest trends, etc. only serve to manifest unhappiness rather than happiness. As Easterbrook says, “Your American Express card cannot buy you happiness, but, paradoxically, it can buy you unhappiness: Call this: ‘the revenge of the plastic’ ” (p.125). Essentially, if you are expecting stuff you buy and things you do to create happiness, they certainly won’t.

As described in this issue’s “Budding Trees Moon” column, to make a change in your life, you first need to bring awareness to it. This comprehensive, well-documented book examines all areas of our lives over the last few centuries describing how Western life has changed with the advances in technology, science, medicine, and psychology. Indeed if you want to inventory your perspectives of changes over time, this book highlights them and our usual perceptions to them. One such example is how when trends for women’s shirts shortened so that midriffs showed, the new trend became to augment or touch-up one’s navel to create a “perfect look” with a procedure performed by a cosmetic surgeon that ran around $5,000 (chapter 4). Skimming through this book can bring awareness to the amount of pressure exerted by the media, Hollywood, Wall Street, and other forces to get women and men to spend money with the expressed illusion of creating perfection and presumable happiness. As the title of the book highlights, that quest will only highlight that there are more things to buy or do.

This book can help you find your own insights into how pervasive this questing is in our society (and, by extension, in your own life) and instead how to appreciate the successes already accomplished by our rich society. With awareness, comes insight, and with insight, change can follow. Just as the Lunar Reflections columns have suggested, Easterbrook also explains how optimism, gratitude, and forgiveness can make our lives more fulfilling.